The Mirror has finally lost patience with the Portuguese detectives investigating the abduction of three-year-old Madeleine McCann. "CLUELESS", it splashes, listing "ten major blunders". In the absence of further clues about Madeleine's whereabouts - British and Portuguese police are now drawing up a list of known paedophiles who have travelled to the Algarve recently, according to the Times - the tabloids engage in what the Independent's Deborah Orr memorably calls "feminine tit-beating".
"The McCanns took what to many of us seems an extraordinary decision and one which, I suspect, will torment them in years to come," says Sue Carroll in the Mirror.
"They chose not to use a childminder as they enjoyed a dinner in a nearby restaurant. It was, they must have reasoned, just a hop and a skip away from the ground floor room where Madeleine slept with her twin brother and sister, and close enough to monitor.
"Surely, no family will take that risk ever again."
That, according to the Times, is the view of many Portuguese commentators, who cannot understand why a couple would leave their children unattended while they ate supper. "What is the law on leaving children alone?" frets the paper.
"It may seem right to slide for hours or days into their tragedy, but it is a kind of self-indulgence," warns Deborah Orr in a thoughtful Independent column.
"In Britain, certainly, the voracious need of the media for new information has been a huge factor in the manner in which the police 'handle' such cases.
"During the Soham investigation, it was policy to offer some new piece of information to the mass of waiting reporters every day, in order somehow to take advantage of the huge coverage in investigating the possible whereabouts of the girls. The Portuguese police have not been conducting their investigation into Madeleine McCann's disappearance in this way."
While the operation seems to have been flawed, she says, the value of appeals for a child's safe return is at best debatable.
* This is an extract from the Wrap, our emailed digest of the daily papers. Get a free 30-day trial here.
